Cluster Hosting in Kenya

 

Cluster hosting isn’t widely known compared to other types of hosting. You might already know how shared and dedicated hosting work, but most providers don’t offer “cluster” services. That’s a shame since cluster hosting provides many benefits that other types of plans don’t.

With cluster hosting plans, your website doesn’t reside in just one server but across many. This can offer huge benefits when it comes to scaling your site (handling more traffic) and avoiding downtime.

However, the main drawback is that cluster hosting is a more advanced hosting setup, which makes it a lot pricier than your average web host.

“Traditional” web hosting uses one server for one or multiple client accounts and websites. There are several types of hosting plans that use this model. The common thread between all of them is that each site is assigned to a specific server.

With cluster plans, the key difference is that your website will be hosted across multiple servers, typically in the same physical location. Each server is typically called a node.

👉 For example, your host might be hosted on five different servers (nodes) in the same location, which means there’s no single point of failure. A web host might have various server clusters across multiple regions, each with its own set of clients.

What makes cluster hosting different?

The main benefits of cluster hosting are a high degree of 💪 scalability and reliability.

Depending on the cluster’s resources, its servers should be able to handle spikes in traffic without any issues.

Many cluster hosting approaches can also create new nodes in the cluster at will, which lets the host generate more servers during high traffic situations. This is called “horizontal scaling.”

In contrast, “vertical scaling” works by adding more resources to a single server rather than adding more servers.

 

 

Moreover, downtime shouldn’t be a problem because it is nearly impossible for all servers in a cluster to go down at the same time. Basically, having a cluster means there’s no single point of failure.

To direct traffic between these different servers, a host will typically employ a load balancer. The load balancer does what its name suggests – it balances the load of your site’s traffic by directing traffic to different servers in the cluster.

ℹ️ It’s important to understand that cluster hosting is not a budget option. Most cluster plans start in the hundreds of dollars per month. You’re usually paying for clusters with plenty of resources and hands-on-server management. Therefore, unlike cloud hosting plans, it’s very rare to find cheap cluster hosting providers.

What to look for in a cluster hosting provider

If you’re not yet familiar with cluster hosting plans, you might not know what to look for 🔍 in a provider. Let’s go over the features that you should consider when comparing cluster servers and providers:

• Scalability: When comparing cluster web hosts, you’ll notice most of them have separate plans according to nodes. The more nodes in the cluster, the more resources you’ll get access to. In turn, this means you’ll be able to scale your website further.
• Automatic scaling (auto-scaling): If your site has traffic spikes (e.g., going viral), you might want a provider that lets you set up automatic scaling rules. Again, this lets you horizontally scale your site by spinning up more nodes during high-traffic periods (and then shutting down those added nodes when they’re no longer needed to keep costs down).
• Load balancing: Any cluster setup worth its salt will have a custom load balancing setup. This makes it easier to distribute the work of hosting your site across the entire cluster. It should also avoid downturns in performance when the site is under stress.
• Private switches: With private switches, the virtual machines that host your website are completely isolated from the other customers in the cluster.
• Managed setup: If you don’t have a background in server management, it may be worth paying for managed cluster setups.

📌 The best cluster web hosts typically offer managed services. That’s because customers that use this kind of plan usually want the best performance and features. However, if you’re launching your first website, this type of plan can be overkill.

Pros and cons of cluster hosting

There are a lot of benefits to using cluster servers.

The main upside of cluster setups is that you get a great deal of scalability. The more nodes you pay for, the more resources that you’ll get access to, which means your account can handle more traffic or websites.

Compared to cloud hosting, cluster servers tend to offer better performance, and they’re often managed. That means you get a team working to make sure your cluster delivers the best possible performance and security.

What’s more, your site will have rock-solid reliability because there’s no single point of failure. If one node goes down, the load balancer can seamlessly redirect traffic to other nodes that are still working.

All of those upsides come at a cost, though. In this case, that cost is a high price tag. Most cluster plans start in the $500-1,000 range per month, and it’s not uncommon to see options that cost thousands of dollars.

With that in mind, cluster hosting is only viable if you have a well-established website (or multiple sites) and need the very best performance, scalability, and reliability.

If you’re launching a new website and you have little experience with hosting, we recommend trying out other types of plans, such as virtual private server (VPS) or shared setups instead.

Top cluster hosting providers

There aren’t a lot of web hosts that offer cluster server setups. This is a somewhat niche hosting plan geared toward demanding customers. Take a look at these 3 cluster server providers:

1. ScalaHosting
2. Liquid Web
3. euroVPS

Benefits Associated With Clustered Hosting

When we talk about the benefits associated with clustered hosting, we know that security levels are generally not integrated into the platforms in common situations of normal hosting solutions. To combat this weakness, many hosts implement a firewall. For this, there are several levels of security in a clustered hosting platform. There is a proxy tool. Integrated firewall, switching and intellectual super routing structure are present in a standard clustered hosting network standard. Compared with other traditional techniques of hosting, cluster hosting offers many benefits in this way.

Another important factor is that it helps to overcome network attacks that often result in the corruption of material. You can get a web hosting cluster at competitive prices and the client is also authorized to manage the security settings.

More benefits of clustering

Speed

Websites that are hosted in a clustering environment are load, faster as compared to those that are on normal servers. The distribution of RAM power and CPU speed indicates a website will have all the resources it requires to work speedily and efficiently.

Shared Roles

Within the clustering environment, servers are can be allocated specific roles, as opposed to possessing all of them to perform the same tasks. Roles can be allocated depending on the amount of speed, disk space, and bandwidth that they have individually so it can all be utilized in tandem. This helps in smoothing website job performance rates as only one server will be addressed to perform a particular task rather than randomly assigning tasks.

Zero Downtime

This is because there is more than one server accessible to the clients’ websites and the risks of the server running down along with the site is as near to zero. In case, if one server goes down, another one takes over.

Scalability

Scaling up (or down) is a task that can be accomplished with relative ease. Because of the load-balancing impact of the cluster, adding or removing a server (or individual resources/features on a server) is easy and comes with no harm as the environment continues working without a hitch.

When it comes to the client, you don’t need to forecast or plan for scaling up in case there is a rise in demand for resources.

Efficiency

In case there is a need for maintenance – which will guarantee there is a rise in performance – the hosting company doesn’t need to stop its servers to perform. This means the clients can expect the most excellent service as the company will continue to make their servers effective without any trouble to the customer.

Security

Most (if not all) hosting providers do not make public the accurate structure of their server clusters. This means, to anyone observing inside from the outside – as a hacker would – it would be challenging to know where a site is being hosted because of the lowered visibility of the underlying internal structure of the server stack, which is a complex task depending on the size of the web hosting provider. In case the cloud is involved, the architecture becomes even more complex.

However, this means websites that are hosted in these kinds of environments are extremely secure.

Flexibility

A web hosting provider that has achieved the clustering architecture will be able to satisfy the demands of any of its clients’. Because should there be any new demands for features that were earlier unavailable, it can be efficiently managed to start implementing it because all it takes would be to add a new server in their cluster.

Conclusion 🏁

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